


Headstone

by telm_393



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Best Friends, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss of Faith, Road Trips, Wildly inaccurate depiction of Sam's time in the Air Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 20:25:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2283411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam dreams. Sam remembers.</p><p>(It's winter, when he meets Riley. They're sixteen years old.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Headstone

**Author's Note:**

> Sam's backstory is both from the comics (a.k.a. what I learned about the comics from wikipedia) and made up by me.

The day before he and Steve head out to look for Bucky, Sam dreams that he’s walking down a deserted street.

He walks for a while and then a car comes screaming past, flipping over and over, and Sam has to jump into the grass next to the road to avoid it.

He stands up and stumbles into the street as the car stabilizes, upright again. Somebody punches through the windshield.

“Hey?” Sam yells. “Hey, you okay?”

Whoever’s in the car staggers out. He’s holding a gun, a semiautomatic. Sam is uncharacteristically transfixed.

Sam finally looks at the person, who steps into the middle of the street, longish hair draping over the mask on his face.

“Bucky?” Sam asks with a frown.

But Bucky's hair isn't that particular shade of brown, and then he pulls off the mask and it’s not Bucky at all.

_“Riley?”_

He wakes up gasping.

+

It's winter, when he meets Riley. It’s snowing. They’re sixteen years old, at school, and Sam’s ditching class and smoking outside the building, freezing his ass off because this is what nicotine addiction does to you, apparently—makes you willing to smoke in the snow when the temperature outside is something ridiculous. He wishes he’d never started smoking. Doesn’t mean he’s going to stop, though.

He knows that if he starts making a habit of ditching it’ll just get him nowhere fast, but he’s planning on enlisting after high school and he doesn’t think he’ll need much algebra for that.

Besides, it’s his second time taking algebra. The first time, he actually tried, no matter what his mom says, but this time it just doesn’t seem worth it.

“Hey, can I have one?” a kid his age asks, pointing at the pack of cigarettes poking out of Sam’s pocket. He’s got sandy brown hair and he looks like he works out. Attractive. Not Sam’s type.

He gives him a cigarette and a light. He kind of feels like having company, even though God knows he doesn’t feel that way all the time, or even most of the time. Usually he likes people just fine, but lately he doesn’t feel himself.

It has to do with dad dying (with the image he can’t get out of his head even though he never actually saw it, the image of dad bleeding out in the street with a stab wound in his gut) is what his mother says, and Sam doesn’t agree or disagree. Mostly, he just stares out of windows and thinks about how things could be different right now.

“Shouldn’t you be in class?” the kid asks, and Sam shoots him a dubious look.

“How d’you know it’s not my free period?”

“‘Cause you’re in my algebra class.”

Sam snorts. “Then I’m gonna shoot the question right back atcha.”

The kid shrugs. “Algebra’s boring.”

“Yeah. I suck at it anyway.”

“I’m pretty good, I could help you.”

Sam looks at the guy and shrugs. “Whatever. What’s your name?”

“Riley Evans.”

“Sam Wilson.” He doesn’t say “pleased to meet you” like his mother would want him to. He doesn’t say anything after that, just goes back to leaning against the wall and secretly pretending he’s a movie star who can actually get away with shit like this and isn’t going to have to contend with a pissed off mom later after she gets a call from the school saying he ditched. Again.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Riley asks, and it’s such a weird thing for a sixteen year old to say that Sam turns to look at him, eyebrows raised. He’s been trying to train his face to raise just one eyebrow like Spock, but he hasn’t figured out how yet.

“Nothin’,” Sam says, shrugging.

Riley laughs, and Sam feels like he should bristle, like he should be offended that this guy’s laughing at him, but it’s a nice laugh, and it just makes him feel relaxed. “You’re saying there’s nothing going on in your head? C’mon, you’re deep in thought, admit it.”

_My dad’s been dead for two months and he was a man of God, and I’m trying to believe in God for him but I can’t. I can’t. Not when God existing would mean He let a minister get stabbed in the street. Not when the police don’t give a shit._

Sam can’t. Instead, he says, “Things are fucked up right now.” Personally, he thinks they’re going to be fucked up forever, but he doesn’t say that.

Riley nods sagely. “Wanna get out of here? Grab something to eat?”

“I have other classes.”

“Were you actually gonna go to them?”

Sam feels his lips quirk into a smile. It’s tiny, but it’s real, and it makes him feel relieved, that he can still smile without that ugly plastic feeling. “Nah. Let’s go.”

They head to a diner and the waitress knows they’re ditching, Sam can tell because she gives them the evil eye before realizing he’s poor Paul Wilson’s kid and smiling out of pity.

Riley seems to notice too, and he looks down, embarrassed. They go to a small school, a private school, and Sam’s suddenly struck by the fact that everybody knows what happened to his dad, so Riley has to know.

He’s so grateful that Riley didn’t bring it up that it makes him feel kind of nauseous. He orders pancakes anyway.

+

“Hey, Steve,” Sam says. His arm’s hanging out the window and he’s feeling the cool breeze. He’s in a contemplative mood. Or maybe it’s just that he’s half-asleep. The radio’s not on, and in the back of his mind he knows there’s something off about that.

“Yeah?” Steve mumbles, snapping out of the introspective state he’s been in for most of today. For most of this trip so far, actually.

“We’ve gotta take a detour in Iowa.”

“What? Why?”

“‘Cause,” Sam explains.

Steve snorts. “That’s helpful.”

“I have to,” and then he says it. His words taste bitter with guilt and he hopes Steve can’t tell. “I have to visit Riley’s grave.”

Steve is silent for a long time. “Oh,” he finally says. “Okay.”

Steve doesn’t say much after that, probably too lost in thought. Sam doesn’t envy him, getting his best friend back in this sudden, violent way. Getting his best friend back but knowing that so much of what tied them together is lost forever.

So he doesn’t envy Steve.

He doesn’t.

+

Riley makes good on his promise to help Sam with algebra, and it turns out he’s not that bad at it. Riley’s a good teacher. He’s definitely really good at algebra, and apparently he’s only taking the class because he “didn’t feel like taking calculus yet”.

Sam’s mom hates Riley at first because of how he and Sam met—“he’s a bad influence,” she says, even though Sam’s probably a worse influence and Riley’s family seems to like him just fine—but he wins her over with his smile and that laugh and the way he helps Sam with his math.

They don’t ditch much after they meet, mostly for the benefit of their mothers and because algebra class isn’t as boring when there’s a friend there.

They spend a lot of time together. Sam doesn’t really have friends—he lost them all after his dad died, because they felt too awkward around him, he guesses—other than Riley, and all of Riley’s friends pretty much leave once he starts hanging out with Sam, so they’ve really got nobody else.

And the thing is, they’re actually pretty okay with that. Sam’s never known anyone who can command a room with his smile, never known anyone who can talk for hours and keep being interesting, never known anyone like Riley, who always stops to help people who’ve fallen.

“Look, I’m gonna tell you a secret,” Riley says one night when he and Sam are out camping, looking up at the stars. “I don’t think I had an actual friend before you.”

“You had loads of friends,” Sam mumbles, feeling weirdly guilty about that, because where did those loads of friends even go?

“Nah. They were just around. We partied together and shit, but parties are pretty boring anyway. I like this better.”

Sam smiles up at the stars. “We clicked,” he says, and then, “my dad used to say that all the time. That someday I’d find someone I just clicked with. I think he meant some kind of special someone, but you’ll do fine.”

Riley snorts. “Good to know I’m good enough,” he snarks, but his voice is soft and he sounds almost touched. “Sam…” he says after a while. “What happened? To your dad, what happened?”

Sam sucks in a breath that doesn’t really reach his lungs. “You know what happened, everyone does.”

“Yeah, but…you never talk about it. Do you ever think it would, like, help to talk about it?”

“There’s really nothing to know. My dad got stabbed to death trying to break up some dumbass fight. He was a good man, he was a minister, and God betrayed him. If God even exists.”

Because sometimes he still can’t bring himself to denounce God completely even though he was ready to do it before dad died, even though he was sick and tired of piety. Not when God meant so much to his dad. He still has those books his dad gave him, those books about religion and theology. All that.

He knows God gives comfort to people, and sometimes he feels that, sometimes he finds himself thinking, “At least dad’s in heaven, at least he’s where he wanted to be.”

“I believe in God,” Riley says quietly.

“Then how do you explain my dad bleeding out on the street when his whole life was about God?”

It takes a long time, but Riley finally says, “I don’t know.”

Sam closes his eyes and imagines his father’s face. He’s got a good memory for faces, can remember them clear as a photograph. He feels a tear slip down his cheek and wipes it away hard because he’s seventeen years old and he’s not going to cry in front of his best friend.

Riley doesn’t hug him. They don’t do that. They always keep a physical distance even though they’re closer than most other guy friends.

Instead, Riley just grabs onto Sam’s shoulder and squeezes hard.

+

They’re in Iowa. Riley and Sam might have met in New York, but Riley’s family was from Iowa, so he’s buried here, in the family plot.

The truth is, Sam’s only been to the grave once, and that was during the funeral.

The truth is, Sam loved Riley with everything he had, and the idea of looking at what’s left of him, of seeing a rock where there should be a person—it strikes him as ridiculous in the least funny way imaginable.

But he has to do it, because Steve Rogers would move heaven and earth for his best friend and Sam remembers what that was like with a clarity that crushes his heart, and he's suddenly missing Riley fiercely in a way he thought he just didn’t anymore, and there's a desperate part of him that wants the grave to fill some sort of void.

He looks at Steve and admits to himself, _I am jealous of you. You got him back. There’s only space for one miracle in this car, so you got your best friend, I got a grave._

+

Sam and Riley enlist in the Air Force together.

They end up in the same pararescue unit as wingmen, and it’s so easy for them to be in sync, because they’ve been in sync since day one. When they move they complement each other, when they feel like it they can finish each other’s sentences. The other guys in the unit call them “the twins”. Sam laughs, but he knows it’s true: they’re brothers.

“This is what we were born to do,” Riley says one night in Afghanistan.

Sam says, “I dunno. I always wanted to go into psychology. I got onto the whole enlisting thing ‘cause my grades weren’t so hot, and after a while I realized it was for me.”

Riley gives him a look. “You’re shitting me.”

“What, you don’t think I’d be good at it? At helping people?”

“Hey, man, you know I support you.” Riley says, laughing. Then he goes quiet. “But just in case we…y’know…just…you should remember we’re already helping people.”

They don’t often bring up that any day could be their last day, and Sam doesn’t really want to talk about it, doesn’t want to try to imagine the unthinkable, one of them without the other. So he just watches the sun set, and Riley watches with him.

The silence is comfortable, but it’s always been that way.

Two weeks later, they get pulled aside and assigned to a new project. Sam feels a thrill when he hears the name: EXO-7 Falcon.

+

Sam’s grown a lot since he was a sixteen year old kid angry at the world. He still doesn’t talk much, but he is willing to talk.

Sometimes he wishes Steve would ask about Riley. Sometimes he wishes he could get a chance to say, _When Riley died, I stopped trying to believe in God._

He knows that Steve still believes, and sometimes he wishes he could too. But somehow a world with a God that would take away his best friend who crossed himself before jumping out of planes seems worse than one with no God at all.

The graveyard is getting closer, and Sam finally realizes why it’s so strange that there’s no music at all, finally recognizes the humming in the back of his head as a familiar voice. He used to take these trips with Riley, used to go see ridiculous money-grabbing tourist attractions. The radio in the car was broken, but Riley would sing.

He’s still expecting Riley to sing.

+

Riley dies on a hot, sunny day—but all the days are hot and sunny—as he arcs up gracefully into the air, Sam backing him up the whole way.

Sam doesn’t really remember who they were fighting. He doesn’t remember much at all, except for the sound of the gunshot, and then the horrible screech of metal as Riley’s left wing broke, and the trail of smoke as he fell.

He remembers flying as fast as he ever had, down, down, down, not thinking of anything but getting Riley before he hit the ground.

He remembers catching him, the relief as he touched down on the ground, Riley’s unconscious body in his arms.

He remembers noticing that Riley’s head was at an unnatural angle, trying to scream but no sound coming out.

Realizing his best friend was dead before he hit the ground.

+

Sam walks into the graveyard, Steve trailing behind. The air is cool and the grass is a rich dark green. Sam takes a deep breath as he approaches the grave. “Hey, man,” he says casually. The words just slip out, but he immediately feels like an idiot for talking to a polished stone. He places a hand on the stone and doesn’t understand how a person can go from vibrant under the sunlight to this, decomposed under the dirt.

He closes his eyes and tries to recall the words he spoke at Riley’s funeral before he broke down and had to be led away from the podium, but he can’t.

All he can think is, _I miss you_.

From next to him, Steve speaks, finally. “Tell me about him,” he says.

Sam’s lips quirk into a smile. “Thought you’d never ask.”


End file.
